


To Be Under The

by Rubynye



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Octopus Steals My Video Camera And Swims Off With It While It's Recording
Genre: Alien Character(s), F/M, Interspecies, Other, Tentacle Sex, Tentacles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-21
Updated: 2012-01-02
Packaged: 2017-10-27 15:46:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/297465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rubynye/pseuds/Rubynye
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three meetings of two very different minds.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [boosette](https://archiveofourown.org/users/boosette/gifts).



> Title from [Octopus's Garden](http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/beatles-lyrics/octopus_s-garden-lyrics.html) by Ringo Starr
> 
> Section headings from that and [Octopus](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/octopus/) by ~~Arthur Clement Hilton~~ Algernon Charles Sin-Burn

**  
_the sound of sea-trumpets_   
**

She first sees her land-fish when she is very little, very minute indeed. He appears as an inchoate shape splashing at the sea-surface, phosphorescent planktons swirling around him in the darkness; she reads joy in the lines and angles of his clumsy oblong body, and undulates nearer for a closer view.

He is huge to her present self, awkward and spindly with so few, inflexible limbs. But there's a grace to him as he churns water and algae and air into glowing froth, as he stretches his ungainly body wide across the water without a care that it isn't his natural realm. She bobs between the curling fringes of his shorter limbs and through the stream of air that issues from his forward orifice, curiously extending a tentacle's tip into the bubbles' path as she tumbles amongst them.

For the first time she feels the silvery void which she has only seen before, here at its warm terminus. She pirouettes with the discovery, reaching out to capture bubbles, tasting their emptiness sliding across her skin as they break and merge around her. In her giddy delight she is incautious, whirling until she smacks up against something flat and clear, slick as seashell, transparent as living water.

Behind it lies an enormous eye, concentric rings of dark and kelp-tones and red-crackled white. A fringed sheet of skin sweeps down and up again as she watches, an eyelid like hers! And then it fixes her again with its alien stare.

Or no -- not alien. It has a pupil, bizarrely round, and behind it -- _something_ flickers, sending warm--hot tingles along her skin and through all her arms until they stand out straight, one by one by one.

The land-fish incontrovertibly possesses a mind, no matter what her siblings argue. She has seen it.

In the next moment it flicks its long limbs, producing a roaring, rolling splash that casts her far away, sending her tumbling amongst disoriented jellies and dismayed krill. So she reaches out around herself, capturing mouthful after tasty quivering mouthful, but all the while as she feasts she contemplates what she's seen this night, the land-fish she has met. This she will not forget.

 

**  
_warm below the storm_   
**

When she next sees him she has grown, her limbs long and twining, her eyes large and clear. As he swims through the daylight he is no longer so immense, plunging amidst the life flashing and slithering by, all blue-black and yellow-pink and strangely jointed as ever, with a bulbous gleaming-dark appendage she hadn't seen before. She wriggles from beneath a snug rock ledge to better watch as he holds it to his flat clear eye-covering, and suddenly -- it separates from his grip! He readjusts his hold with those little stubby grippers, but she can feel the surprise flushing over her in yellow-red waves. The gleaming thing isn't an appendage but a useful item! Could it be a special rock? But she's never seen such a gleaming angled rock except down in the trenches of the ocean, in the far realm where no glimmer of surface light penetrates, where the only lights are yellow anglerfish's lures and green eldritch-glows.

Determined curiosity ripples down her arms. She must find out.

He swims incautiously, with all the lumbering joy and bizarre flashes of grace she remembers. It's easy to fold herself around his grippers and pluck the dark-gleaming thing from amongst them; she enfolds it, examining it with her sensitive suckers, and she did intend to return it to him, really, but he gives chase, flourishing his long sharp-tipped strut as he reaches towards her.

So she sets him his chase, warm light and water flowing over her, and he flounders after her through the dapples and currents. Despite his sharp thing it's a playful race, their undulations bubbling, her tentacles-tips flickering teasingly at him as he chases her among fronds and over rocks. All the while as she swims along she gently tugs and probes the flat-round ends and the finely nubbled walls of the dark-gleaming maybe-rock she's borrowed.

No, she decides, it's not a rock. It is strange and hard with voids inside, she can sense by its shifting balance. It must be a thing from the realm of land, and that is all she can tell unless she tries to break it open. She suspects, strange though he is, even the land-fish would not like that, any more than she likes it when her carefully arranged dens are dug up by morays and dolphins.

So she lets him reach her, gathering herself in close in case he is angry, and though he reaches out with his sharp point it isn't turned towards her, it's presented broadside as a kind of offering. She blooms like an anemone to let him retrieve his dark-gleaming not-rock, and as she does she slips a tentacle-tip between the cracks of his bark to steal a taste of his inner skin, fine creases and scattered hairs and strange proteinaceous savors, a different salt.

She has heard tell of such flavors. She decides she likes it.

For now she accepts his offering, winding herself around the stem of his sharp point, relishing the safety brinked with danger. He swims onwards, and for all his ungainliness he can reach a pleasant swiftness; taking her ease, she lets him bear her for a time, delighting in the unfurling currents as his sharp point slices through the water, waving her tentacles in rhythms of delight. He seems to enjoy it as much as she does, plunging onwards with the familiar joy of motion, and thus companionably they travel together through the sunlit ocean's streaming warmth.

 

**  
_eight-folded embraces_   
**

She sees him next in a space between places, at the sea's sandy edge and the night's pinkening conclusion. She's been lonely, having swum long stretches through deep green deserts of ocean in order to sense unhindered the magnetic currents of the planet's depths, where she fed upon tough clams and squashy worms and met no minds with whom to trade thoughts; wearying of her journeys, she returned to these familiar shallow seas along the continent's edge, but found many of her friends gone and the rest spawning-silly, swimming crazy misshapen loops or draped prone over corals as they waited for their brood to rise and themselves to die.

Surrounded by planktonic infants, watching scale-fish bite eagerly at her friends' corpses, she has been uncertain why she even returned. And then she sees him, languorous at the sea's surface. There is something melancholy in the slow arch and fall of his jointed limbs, something plaintive in the plash of his flippers, and she flows along beneath him, letting his rhythm wash over her in echoing ripples.

He leads her to the very seashore, sand and shells and smoothed pebbles, and she squirms up to meet him, reaching to touch him. She has learned during her journeys, from his blood-kin the seals and her siblings in the deep, and he must have molted, he is soft and fleshy without his outer bark. When she settles suckers onto his bared skin, so much thinner and more supple than a seal's, she can taste the electricity of his nerves and even a hint of the heavy iron of his strange blood.

He tenses at her touch, then relaxes, a pulse along his striated muscles. She slides closer, fitting herself beneath him, curling several of her limbs around him and tucking her head beneath what she guesses to be his, though it's oblong and bears neither gills nor mouth nor eyes. Those organs he carries on a fifth protuberance, too stubby and hard to be a limb despite its mobility, and she winds her strongest tentacle gently around its short stalk, keeping it raised above the water because land-fish need air. He tenses again, and relaxes again, making noises into the air above them, middle-toned sounds vibrating with fearful hope in a flowing pattern all his own. Only land-fish make such noises, and hers is making them just for her.

The sky above is deep and blue, just like the sea beside and below, and as she curls tighter around him the warmth within him seeps to his surface, leaching into the water around them, suffusing her flesh. It is as if he carries a droplet of sunlight within him, and she wants more of it; suckering his skin to anchor herself as she winds around him, she finds that each kiss of her suckers pulls iron-red blood to his surface and warmth with it, so she applies them all over him, everywhere not in the air.

He tenses and wriggles, his noises rising to sharpness, but not as if trying to break free. The pulsation in his core rises too, quickening and strong, and she presses her mouth over it to feel its rhythm better, keeping her beak well out of the way. Her land-fish raises a strange tenderness within her, so that she would not harm him. Where she's laid her mouth there's a chain of hard bones beneath his skin, like a scale-fish's spine but more robust, and she tugs gently with all her suckers in unison and feels it flex as he writhes more fiercely until his whole body thrashes up and down between air and water, churning sea and air into a froth that tingles and fluffs over her limbs wound all around him.

His heat rises and points on his flesh rise also on the sea-surface side of him, two crinkled bumps in a line above his pulse and a stiffening stalk at the nexus of his longest limbs. She coils a tentacle around that, exploring its firmness and delicate surface, and his noises rise all the more, his limbs twist in her grip, but she tastes no discomfort in his nerves, just -- pleasure? She ripples suckers up alongside the stalk and yes, he definitely finds pleasure in this, something much like what her friends drunkenly flash-babbled to her, garish tales of mating while their minds disintegrated.

Perhaps she should release him. She would not want him to go senile and die from the pleasure like her friends did. But every bit of him streams with this sunlight beneath his skin, waves of warmth pouring off him into the shallow water, and to stop now would be like leaving a succulent fish half-eaten. She winds her coils back and forth, pulling at his flesh with her suckers until she can taste the reddened circles of skin, and noises pour forth from him as electricity gushes through all his nerves and milt pumps through his stalk. For a long luminous moment she tingles with him, brightness streaming through her as they tremble suspended between sea and sky, as pink light pours over them and she drinks in the contentment welling from his skin.

Then he tenses again, differently, discordantly, and she unwinds and lets him go. He tumbles over her limbs and away, clumsier than ever, into the shallows where the waves wash back and forth. He blinks at her, and she blinks at him, looking into those strangely familiar eyes.

He scrambles up onto the land, and she lets the next wave pull her back to the sea.

 

**  
_O mystical monster marine_   
**

Something in that strange experience she shared with the land-fish keeps prickling through her skin, flashing colors and raising pimples at the strangest times, and soon enough she goes where she must, swimming down through the darkest depths of the sea, beneath the angler-fishes' realm and the cavernous whales' skeletons, to where living shadows flicker darkly through black waters and the green lights glow from below.

Soon enough, she journeys home to R'lyeh, undulating past the encrusted battlements, sliding her tentacles along the great rough-stone walls. Soon enough she burrows through soothing slimes and greets Typhon with a swirling curtsey, his laugh crashing like storm-whipped waves as he opens the weed-encrusted gate to the inmost precincts. There, a great rectangular stone block stands out amongst the city's curves and undulations, shining with acid-green radiance amidst countless tentacles. There she settles amongst her siblings into an oozing, winding mass, upon the broad tomb of their great progenitor Cthulhu.

Her siblings reach out to her, twining limbs with her, but she spares one tentacle to find a tiny fissure between the intricate carvings, a crack of entry into the darkness. There she flattens her tip to the utmost, and waits, until a heavy drifting limb brushes it from within.

There she tells her Mother-Father-Deity the story of her dalliance, in thoughts of scents and sounds, images and flavors, the writhing congress she shared with her land-fish and the radiant joys of discovery and carnality. There she begs the boon that the world of land be left undestroyed a little longer, until she can find her land-fish once more.

Cthulhu laughs in dreaming sleep, like a seaquake or a typhoon, and tells her in the sense of rippling skin-patterns, in the echoing call of distant whales, in a voice like her land-fish's but booming infinitely deep, _Before I decide, my daughter, tell me your tale again._


	2. My Poemic Inspirations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The poems that I referred to whilst writing this.

Title from [Octopus's Garden](http://www.elyrics.net/read/b/beatles-lyrics/octopus_s-garden-lyrics.html) by Ringo Starr

Section headings from that and from [Octopus](http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/octopus/) by Arthur Clement Hilton

 

Octopus's Garden lyrics

I'd like to be under the sea  
In an octopus's garden in the shade  
He'd let us in, knows where we've been  
In his octopus's garden in the shade

I'd ask my friends to come and see  
An octopus's garden with me  
I'd like to be under the sea  
In an octopus's garden in the shade

We would be warm below the storm  
In our little hideaway beneath the waves  
Resting our head on the sea bed  
In an octopus's garden near a cave

We would sing and dance around  
Because we know we can't be found  
I'd like to be under the sea  
In an octopus's garden in the shade

We would shout and swim about  
The coral that lies beneath the waves  
(Lies beneath the ocean waves)  
Oh what joy for every girl and boy  
Knowing they're happy and they're safe  
(Happy and they're safe)

We would be so happy you and me  
No one there to tell us what to do  
I'd like to be under the sea  
In an octopus's garden with you  
In an octopus's garden with you  
In an octopus's garden with you

 

Octopus

By Algernon Charles Sin-Burn  
Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,  
Whence camest to dazzle our eyes?  
With thy bosom bespangled and banded  
With the hues of the seas and the skies;  
Is thy home European or Asian,  
O mystical monster marine?  
Part molluscous and partly crustacean,  
Betwixt and between.  
Wast thou born to the sound of sea trumpets?  
Hast thou eaten and drunk to excess  
Of the sponges -- thy muffins and crumpets,  
Of the seaweed -- thy mustard and cress?  
Wast thou nurtured in caverns of coral,  
Remote from reproof or restraint?  
Art thou innocent, art thou immoral,  
Sinburnian or Saint?

Lithe limbs, curling free, as a creeper  
That creeps in a desolate place,  
To enroll and envelop the sleeper  
In a silent and stealthy embrace,  
Cruel beak craning forward to bite us,  
Our juices to drain and to drink,  
Or to whelm us in waves of Cocytus,  
Indelible ink!

O breast, that 'twere rapture to writhe on!  
O arms 'twere delicious to feel  
Clinging close with the crush of the Python,  
When she maketh her murderous meal!  
In thy eight-fold embraces enfolden,  
Let our empty existence escape,  
Give us death that is glorious and golden,  
Crushed all out of shape!

Ah! thy red lips, lascivious and luscious,  
With death in their amorous kiss,  
Cling round us, and clasp us, and crush us,  
With bitings of agonised bliss;  
We are sick with the poison of pleasure,  
Dispense us the potion of pain;  
Ope thy mouth to its uttermost measure  
And bite us again!


End file.
